The Skin Map

CHAPTER 11
In Which Efforts Are Made and Actions Taken

The journey in Sir Henry’s coach was, Kit considered, enjoyable if not exactly comfortable. Gentle autumn sunlight poured down like honey, suffusing the genteel English landscape with a fine amber glow. The fields and small towns rolled slowly by, unfolding one after another in stately progression at the regular steady clip-clop pace of the two chestnut mares. Sir Henry himself, in his smart black hat with the silver buckle, black leather gloves, and silver-topped ebony walking stick, was the very picture of gentlemanly style and grace. Occasionally, they met or passed other travellers: farmers with donkey carts, traders with pack mules, a hay wain pulled by heavy horses; more often, they encountered foot traffic: country folk carrying baskets of produce or pulling fully laden handcarts; more rarely, they saw riders.

The only drawback in travelling this way was the road, which was more in the way of an endless series of potholes joined by ruts than a seamless ribbon of pavement. At intervals there were streams to be forded or rocky steeps to be negotiated. The latter required the passengers to alight while Sir Henry’s young driver expertly led the team and coach over the rough terrain. The jouncing, bouncing jolt and sway of the carriage took some getting used to, but once mastered became oddly soothing.

What his two companions were telling him, however, was anything but soothing. Kit tried to keep his mind on what they said, but it was proving a struggle. Most of what they told him he simply could not comprehend, and the small portion he did understand sounded too fantastic to credit-even by his own increasingly relaxed standards-and he could not help feeling that Sir Henry and Cosimo had parted company with the solid ground of reality and were now floating high over fantasyland.

Then again, why quibble? Why strain at a gnat, his father used to say, when you’ve already swallowed a gnu-hooves, tail, horns, and moo?

“See here now, Kit,” his great-grandfather was saying. “Pay attention; this is important. When you travel to another world, the best policy is to interfere with the locals as little as possible and only when strictly necessary. Why, you ask? Because every interaction changes things in unexpected ways. Small, insignificant changes may be absorbed without undue strain, but large changes result in wholesale alterations in the universe, and we don’t want that.”

“I don’t know anyone who does,” replied Kit. “But, hold on a second-what about the other night? You know-when you woke up the baker and prevented the fire? Isn’t that just the sort of interference you’re talking about?”

“Precisely!” exclaimed Sir Henry. “It would be best to refrain from that sort of thing.”

“Excuse me?” protested Kit. “If interference is forbidden, then how do you explain tampering with something as significant as the Great Fire of London?”

“Our actions,” his great-grandfather replied, adopting a superior tone, “were taken only after a long and serious consultation. We discussed it for several years and arrived at the conclusion that it would serve no one’s interest to allow all the suffering and upheaval of that disaster if it could be prevented.”

“Not even in the rebuilding of the city in stone?” wondered Kit. That was the one thing historians always pointed to when discussing the Great Fire: a new world-class city arising phoenix-like from the ashes.

Cosimo nodded. “We considered that, too, of course. But how many human lives would you trade for a stone building or two? Anyway, nothing emerged from the fire that would not have come about by other, less destructive, means. The fire merely lent speed and urgency to a process already begun. In short, there was no reason for all those thousands of innocent townsfolk to suffer and, as is most always the case with any disaster, it is those who can least afford to lose who lose the most.”

“Not to mention the enormous obstacle on the road to enlightened learning,” added Lord Castlemain.

“Sir?” wondered Kit.

“Saint Paul’s cathedral, of course,” replied Sir Henry, as if this should be self-evident.

“It is where London’s booksellers stored their wares,” explained Cosimo. “All the books on medicine, science, mathematics, history -everything lost. The fire would set learning back a hundred years, and at a time when reading was just beginning to catch on, as it were.”

This sounded reasonable. “So, until you can be sure you know the effects of what you’re changing, the best course is not to interfere too much.”

“Some change is unavoidable,” Cosimo allowed. “Merely by your presence, you alter the present reality of the world you are visiting. But just remember that every change, however small, has consequences. If the universe is altered enough, the effects can ripple through the entire Omniverse.”

“The what? Omniverse?” Kit shook his head. “Where do you get these words?”

“Omniverse,” repeated his great-grandfather. “Put simply, it is everything that exists. It is this universe and who knows how many others-because there may well be more than one.”

“That has yet to be proven,” said Sir Henry. “Though it does seem much the likeliest explanation.”

“Think of it as the grand total of all that is, was, or will ever be,” Cosimo told him. “It is the Great Universe which may contain an unquantifiable number of smaller universes-like seeds packed in a pomegranate.”

“Why do we need so many?” wondered Kit.

“I don’t know,” confessed Cosimo. “But we seem to have them all the same-each in its own dimension, separated from the others by the thinnest of skins.”

Kit thought for a moment, then said, “I understand about travelling to other worlds and how they aren’t in the same time zone, so to speak. But, if you already know where the ley lines are and where they go, why do you need the map?”

“You’re not thinking big enough,” Cosimo chided. “How best to describe it?” He put his chin in his hands and looked out the window a moment, musing. “I know!” he said suddenly. “You’re familiar with the London Underground train system, yes?”

“My home away from home,” remarked Kit.

“How many different lines make up the Underground system?”

“I don’t know-a dozen, maybe.”

“And how many stops?” inquired Cosimo. “In total, how many stations would you say there are?”

Kit shrugged. “A few hundred, I suppose-give or take.”

“Indeed,” affirmed Cosimo. “Now the lines on the London Underground are on different levels-some higher, some lower, and some very low-and they crisscross through the earth in three dimensions, linking up at various points along the way.”

“The connecting stations,” added Kit. “So you can change lines.”

“Yes, but not every line connects with every other-they merely connect wherever they will and there is no guessing where those connections might be. It is an ingenious system, but also very complicated. People can easily become confused when they use it, not so?”

“It has been known to happen,” granted Kit, who, as a regular victim of tube travel, knew the feeling only too well.

“The best way to avoid this confusion is to use a map-that rather clever schematic drawing with all its colours and crossing lines.” Cosimo’s gaze grew keen. “Now then, what if you attempted to travel from Whitechapel to Uxbridge without that little map? What if there was no helpful diagram posted above the door of the coach, no signs on the platforms, nothing to show where you were or where you were going. You’d be quite lost, would you not? You could not tell where the line went or how many stations the train might pass along the way, or whether those stations linked up to other trains on other lines, or how many other lines there might be, where those lines crossed, or where they led. So, here you are, riding the train without a clue where it’s going-how, I ask you, do you navigate your way out of that?”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” conceded Kit. “You need the map to find your way around a very complex system.”

“Exactly,” agreed Cosimo, warming to his argument. “Now, imagine if you will that you discovered a tube system that was several million times larger than the London Underground, and that there were an inconceivable number of individual lines linking billions of stations and a simply unimaginable number of trains…”

“That would be some big system,” observed Kit.

“And just to make it more interesting, imagine that there was a time element involved so that you never knew when you arrived somewhere what year it might be, or even what century!”

“Awkward,” Kit allowed.

“That is very near the situation we are in, my son,” said Cosimo, leaning back on the bench. “As it happens, Sir Henry and I have visited and committed to memory a few of the lines and several of the stations in our local neighbourhood, as it were. But the far, far greater part of this gigantic system remains a complete and utter mystery-”

“We don’t even know how many other systems there might be,” added Sir Henry. “More than there are stars in the sky, it would seem.”

“Furthermore,” added Cosimo, “to even attempt to travel without the map beyond the few lines we know is incredibly dangerous.”

“Right, so what do you do if you get lost?”

“Dear boy, getting lost is the least of your worries,” his great-grandfather declared. “Consider-jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea.” Cosimo spread his hands and shook his head. “Anything could happen. That is why the map is monumentally, vitally, crucially, life-and-death important.”

“Hear! Hear!” said Sir Henry with a tap of his stick. “We owe Arthur Flinders-Petrie the highest debt of gratitude.”

There was more he wanted to ask, but Kit felt his brain beginning to fuddle. Yet there was one worry that had been gnawing on his conscience. “Getting back to Wilhelmina,” he said. “What happens if, after all we do, we still can’t find her? Tell me the truth. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Who knows?” said Cosimo. “She could of course fall prey to any number of assaults, or she herself might cause unimaginable damage, unleashing catastrophe after catastrophe of unreckoned proportions-”

“Unwittingly, of course,” suggested Sir Henry.

“Or, she could merely settle into a new life as a peculiar stranger in a foreign land, get married, raise a family, and do no harm whatsoever. Then again, depending on the local circumstance, she could be burned at the stake for a witch.” Cosimo lifted an equivocal palm. “There is simply no way to predict the outcome.”

“The chief difficulty, you see, is that being out of joint with her temporal surroundings as she undoubtedly is, the young lady might introduce an idea or attitude alien to the natural course of development of the world in which she now finds herself.” Sir Henry, hands folded over his walking stick, turned his face to the coach window and took in the scenery. “It is such a very complicated business.”

“I’ll say. So, if she changed something in that world,” ventured Kit, who was finally beginning to grasp something of the awful magnitude of the problem, “the changes would spread throughout the universe.”

“Drop a stone into a millpond and watch the ripples multiply until the whole pond is disturbed.”

Cosimo nodded. “‘Thou canst not stir a flower, without troubling of a star,’” he declaimed.

Sir Henry smiled at the quotation. “I have never heard that. Who said it?”

“It’s from a poem by a chap named Francis Thompson-a bit after your time, I’m afraid. Nice, though, isn’t it? Here’s another: ‘The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, moves all the labouring surges of the world.’”

Turning once more to Kit, he said, “The point is that through some innocent action your girlfriend might, like Pandora of old, wreak havocs great and small throughout this universe and beyond.”

“Then we’d better find her fast,” said Kit. “Knowing Wilhelmina, she’s probably stirred up a whole field of flowers by now.”